The folder is not there until I choose "open location." This was the first thing I checked.

Well, that's why I said to check it. Still, it's very odd.

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And calibre certainly does create folders. When you import a new book it creates a folder for that author if not already in the database and a folder for the book.

Of course it creates folders when you add, but when you "open location" it's trying to open a folder that it created when the book was first added. It should never have to create a folder at that point. Could you have changed drive letters? The folder it's "creating" is already in the Calibre database, so I assume it's trying to open a non-existent location and part of that process creates it if it doesn't exist. in normal operation, that should never happen.

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The numbers are the row number assigned to the book when calibre imports it into the database.

Third, I'm assuming that you have good metadata in the empty 1892 record, but no formats in that record. Also, assuming you do not still have the old entries (checked in step 2), open the 1299 folder (with a file explorer outside Calibre) and drag the book format files in it into Calibre's GUI.
This will create a third book id (lets say 1300), but without metadata.
Last, select both of 1299 (good metadata, no book formats) and 1300 (book formats, but no metadata) and choose the Edit Metadata, Merge-delete others to merge the two and keep your good metadata. (Preferably, select 1299 first, but it doesn't matter a lot.)

This all makes no sense, because the problem lies in the metadata.db file not in the book metadata. I can't even select the actual book because calibre doesn't know it exists, as it isn't properly coded in the database. calibre is literally blind to that book because it has improper directions on how to reach it.

I'm not sure what you don't understand here. I'm telling you to drag a book file from a file explorer (outside Calibre) into Calibre's GUI. That causes Calibre to create a new record in metadata.db. (It will also generate a new copy of the book.) That new record now points to the new copy of the book format. It does not have a copy of your old metadata. Then I'm telling you to merge the two records. The reason for the previous checks was to make sure that you didn't already have the two records you need to merge. If you did, you could have skipped the drag-to GUI step. Since you didn't, you needed to create a record that points to a book so you can merge the two.

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And none of this will work because calilbre doesn't know that any of the correct folder exist. I need to fix the "map" so calibre is getting the correct "directions."

The purpose of dragging the file from the library (which Calibre does not know about) into Calibre is to create a record that points to the book.

If it helps any, I wrote the merge record code. I also wrote the code that handles "If books with similar authors and titles found, merge automatically" so I'm intimately familiar with the database structure of Calibre.

I walked you through the simple solution of getting two records into Calibre that you could use my merge code on - one with metadata, and one with pointers to the actual book formats. I started there so you could see one option, however, that manual method is slow. The automatic merge will do the job much faster.

It is possible to "fix the map" as you say, but it's harder than the automatic method described.